Think back to the last busker you saw playing music who had drawn a significant crowd.
Chances are, two things were immediately apparent:
- They were unmistakably and incredibly talented.
- They were playing covers of songs you (and everyone else) recognized
Along with picking the right location to set up and perform, these are two of the prerequisites for success as a busker. And if you can nail those criteria and learn how to work a crowd, you can do pretty well. For a busker at least.
But while many buskers might genuinely love busking, most have higher artistic ambitions.
And so, every so often, they’ll throw in one of their own songs.
When they do, a funny thing tends to happen.
The spell that has drawn and captivated the crowd is broken, the attention is lost, and people start to disperse.
Because original art isn’t what drew them in in the first place.
What drew them in was the sound of a song they already had a positive association with being performed expertly, perhaps in a novel way.
And while familiarity & regurgitation are fantastic shortcuts to engagement, they don’t lead to anything deeper.
And so, when presented with a new song they haven’t already made up their mind about, the audience would often rather move on than stay, listen critically, and decide whether it’s worth sticking around for.
Engagement Hacks ≠True Fan Hacks
This peril of playing covers exists whether we’re busking for change on the street or likes online.
It’s possible—likely even— that with sufficient skill, we can build a repertoire of content that is almost guaranteed to get a positive reception, and perhaps even draw a crowd.
But building an audience by regurgitating other artists’ original work doesn’t often translate to interest in our own original work.
And yet, it can be hard to resist.
Playing covers is a surefire shortcut to attention and engagement, two assets we as creators are all desperate for, especially when we’re just starting out.
If we can find a hack that gives them to us faster, why wouldn’t we take it?
The problem is that playing covers doesn’t build any equity in your own art.
Sure we might have mastered the ability to get attention, but we haven’t invested in the harder work of building an actual fanbase.
Someone else might occupy the same street corner next week, playing a similar repertoire and it’s likely no one would notice the difference, let alone go out of their way to track us down or even follow us on tour.
What’s more, while we might be able to consistently attract attention with our repertoire of covers, attracting attention for our own art isn’t so easy.
Covers Don’t Count Toward the Clock
When playing covers, we can meticulously construct a repertoire that most people already know, and already have a positive association with.
With our own art, however, we’re starting from scratch. Perhaps even less than scratch given that we all tend to be skeptical of new content unless it’s entirely unignorable (usually when we’ve been told about it by at least a half-dozen other people).
When it comes to building an audience around original work, there’s simply no shortcutting the slow, grinding process of winning over one fan at a time, like the sea slowly eroding a cliff face until one day, years after we started, the whole thing comes crashing down.
For most of that time, progress will be slow and virtually unobservable. It’s the 10 years of silence every artist and creator must endure to create great work.
Despite the positive feedback it attracts, time spent playing covers doesn’t count towards the clock.
What’s more, we may end up boxing ourselves out of the ability to share our own work.
If we’re able to get attention, we get accustomed to it. And once we get accustomed to the attention and engagement it gets hard to create and perform to an empty room.
And so we’re incentivized to keep giving people what they already know and like because it serves our ego in the short term… even as it sacrifices our potential in the long term, all while making it harder and harder to ever make the pivot to building an audience around our own work.
Build Equity in Your Original Work
We’ve all seen and heard stories of creators who can hack attention and engagement to build a massive social following, but are incapable of selling products or services.
If we aspire to be more than that, we need to avoid the allure of short-term attention-hacking in favour of long-term equity-building around the work that only we can do.
It will be slow.
It will be painful.
We’ll constantly feel the pull to pander to the cheap and easy engagement of falling back on familiar cover songs.
But cover bands don’t sell albums.
They don’t sell out stadiums.
And no one follows them around the continent on tour.
At best, cover bands are a pleasant diversion, distraction, or addition to the ambiance of a place we’re already occupying.
As creators, artists, marketers, and founders, we can be more than that.
And if we want to make a sustainable (not to mention fulfilling) living from our work, we need to be.
Explore how to navigate a creative life that matters
This article originally appeared in my weekly Creative Wayfinding Newsletter. Each issue is the product of a week of work, and contains something not available for sale.
A fresh perspective, a shot of encouragement when you need it most, and maybe even some genuine wisdom from time to time.
Each week, we explore a different facet of the question “How do we navigate the wilderness between us and our unique creative potential?”
It’s something I’m proud to create and I’d be honoured to share it with you.
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